The present invention relates to a sweeping device, and more particularly to a drive for use in such a device for driving a corner-sweeping brush which is mounted in the housing of the sweeping device for rotation about an axis.
There are already known various sweeping devices of the type here under discussion, and they are generally used for sweeping floors, carpets or, as the case may be, furniture, upholstery or other surfaces. Such surfaces, more often than not, include corner regions, such as the baseboard regions of a floor where the floor meets with the walls of a room, or similar corner regions next to pieces of furniture or other objects. For the sake of simplicity, the present invention will be described as embodied in a floor-sweeping device, without being restricted thereto.
In such a floor-sweeping device, it is already known to provide a housing which carries a dirt-collecting receptacle and at least one main brush which rotates and which deposits the dirt picked up by it from the floor into the receptacle which is to be periodically emptied. It is also already known to provide a drive for such a brush, such drive being often constituted by wheels mounted in the housing and supporting the same during its movement on the floor, a transmission being interposed between these wheels and the brush, which transmits the rotary movement of the wheels to the brush. All this is well known and not part of the present invention.
In addition thereto, it is also already known to provide at least one corner-sweeping brush in the front region of the housing of the sweeping device, which corner-sweeping brush may be mounted for rotation about a horizontal or about a vertical axis. Such a corner-sweeping brush may be driven in rotation either by the aforementioned wheels, or by means of an additional wheel or wheels which drive only the corner-sweeping brush. An additional dirt-collecting receptacle may be associated with such a corner-sweeping brush, or the dirt picked-up by the same may be deposited into the shared receptacle either directly by the corner-sweeping brush, or indirectly as a result of the dirt being forwarded by the corner-sweeping brush to the main brush which picks it up and deposits it into the receptacle.
A generally satisfactory performance is obtained from such floor-sweeping devices; however, these devices are possessed of a not insignificant drawback; namely, the rotation of the corner-sweeping brush is dependent on the movement of the wheels which drive the same, and thus on the movement of the sweeping device as a whole. As a consequence thereof, when the floor-sweeping device encounters an obstruction, such as upon coming into contact with the baseboard, a base of a piece of furniture, or a similar part preventing further forward movement of the floor-sweeping device, the wheels which drive the corner-sweeping brush come to a standstill, and so does the corner-sweeping brush. As a result of this, imperfect or wholly unsatisfactory sweeping results are obtained in the corner regions of the surface or floor being swept. This, of course, is very disadvantageous, since it is exactly these corner regions where the dirt tends to accumulate and in which the sweeping action ought to be more pronounced than in other regions of the surface.